First, I found a 100 crown bill on the stairs outside a house, wrapped in a receipt from a bar in the vicinities. My initial reaction was, 'wow, 100 crowns!' Then, I thought again, and supposed that if I could find out who it belonged to, I should give it back to them. Then, my thoughts started drifting towards how difficult it (hopefully) would be to find the right person ... until I saw a torn up book dissolving in the rain on a ledge nearby. It was the Bible, and it was opened at a passage from the New Testament. I then started thinking about what a cool character Jesus was, and, well, 'What would Jesus do in this situation?'

Full of remorse for my sinful thoughts I was now determined to find the owner of the 100 crown bill.

No, actually, the thought of Jesus reminded me that material blessings have no meaning. (To me, he was a hippie revolutionary, while I don't believe any of the religious stuff about him being 'the son of god'.) Anyway, I get a salary that covers my basic needs, so what do I need another 100 crowns for? And it was 'just' 100 crowns. (Now, if it had been 1000 ...) I wrote a note saying 'this was found outside the door', and wrapped the bill and the receipt in the note and left them at the entrance in the hallway of the house.

The next incident was even more interesting. I was climbing the 'scary stairs' mentioned in the entry below. The lights were on when I entered the staircase, and I was just thinking about how it might not be so pleasant if they would automatically go out while I was still in the staircase, and would have to fumble around in the darkness searching for the switch. I turned around a corner.

There was a man sitting on the stairs.

He scared me to death! I froze and stared at him, gasping in horror for several seconds until I realised that he was just a normal human being, albeit with no shirt and very tired and/or a bit drunk. I then laughed hysterically and tried to explain that I very rarely see any humans this time of the day ... And he was sorry for scaring me.

What I wouldn't give to have seen my face at that moment. It must have been priceless.

At least it's now proven that I don't scream when I get scared. (Thank god. That would have been even more silly ...)

Today, when I was climbing a staircase while distributing the papers, I heard strange noises.

The staircase is one of the two I like the least, because I have to climb to the fourth or fifth floor, and the floors in those old houses are at least three meters high, so I have to do a *lot* of climbing. What makes this particular staircase even worse is that it's really narrow. It used to be the staircase to the kitchen entrances of the bourgeois apartments, and it has massive walls in the middle, instead of rails. I get slight pangs of claustrophobia there sometimes.

Today, when I was getting near the top, I started hearing strange sounds from above, as if someone was dragging something heavy across the floor. It was around four AM. I carried the last paper to the fourth floor, and above that, there is just an attic (I once tried - in vain - to see if there could possibly be any way to go through the attic from the main staircase to this 'kitchen' staircase, because the main one has an elevator). The sounds seemed to be coming from the top of the staircase. They stopped for a moment, when I made noises sticking the paper through the slot in the door, and then, they continued again.

Why didn't the IDF tear down the synagogues in the abandoned Gaza settlements? Some say it was for religious reasons - a Jew can't destroy a holy synagogue. Others, including the PA, suspect the Israeli authorities left that task for the PA so that the Palestinians would look bad when people - inevitably, driven by the two factors 'revenge' and 'poverty' - would start scavenging and destroying the former settlements, including the former synagogues.

Foreign minister Silvan Shalom kind of wraps it up. "A Jew does not destroy a synagogue", he said, adding that if the PA cannot restrain Arabs from demolishing or desecrating the buildings, "The world will know with whom we are dealing." (Quotes from unitedjerusalem.org.)

Well, technically, the synagogues are synagogues no more, as all religious symbols have been removed.

Besides, some settlers left not only anti-disengangement graffiti, but also their welcome greetings for the Palestinians on the walls of their former homes and holy places. Lotta Schüllerqvist, in Dagens Nyheter 16/9, is one of the few foreign correspondents who has bothered to write about this graffiti: "Death to Arabs", "I will come back to kill you, motherfucker".

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Still, I have to say Islamic Jihad militants look rather kick-ass:

(Photo by Emilio Morenatti, AP.) Black flags have traditional connotations of revolution in Arab cultural history. For instance, the rebellion in 747 that brought down the Umayyad caliphate started with revolutionaries flying black flags in Khorasan.